Unbelievers and Christmas

As another Christmas has come and gone, it came to my thoughts today that it is really impossible for an unbeliever to legitimately celebrate Christmas. Unbelievers may celebrate the idol of family during Christmas or the joy of giving (mostly receiving) gifts. But it seems that all unbelievers in reality treat and believe in God just like they sing about and speak of Santa Claus whether they realize it or are willing to admit it. With respect to receiving God's mercy, unbelievers approach Him as they would Santa Claus. Santa Claus only gives gifts to those who have been good for goodness sake. If you are bad he will give you coal and switches. If we have a God like that, then we are beyond hope. Why? Because we are all sinners and we sin every single day - we can't tell God we have been good for we are not. And if God is like Santa Claus, then we will never receive any good gifts from Him with respect to salvation from His holy wrath. That is not good news.

But Christian believers can have true hope and truly celebrate Christmas. They know they are sinners and deserve the wrath of a Holy and Righteous God who gives the greatest gift to those who are wretched to the core of their being. That is what Christmas is - God sent a substitute who would live a perfect life and die in place of all those who would put their trust in Him. Jesus came to save His people from their sins. He did not come to give salvation to the well, but to those who are sick. That is good news.

Each year I enjoy to watching the many versions of Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol. Deep down I hope that Scrooge was truly converted, but most adaptations of this story present his change and hope as rooted in his own ability. If he would change his ways, then his future would be different. The Bible is clear that we really can't change ourselves. Our hope is only in the God who can regenerate our hearts to see the reality of our need and then effectually bring us to Himself in faith and repentance.

So while unbelievers will continue to "celebrate" Christmas each year, it is mere sentimentality and illegitimate. Their hearts are apart from the reason and purpose for Christmas. They are still selfish and seeking to gain a salvation by their own merits and goodness so that the Santa Claus god will give them good things based on their performance. Thank God - Christians have a God who in Christmas gave us our only hope - the God-Man - as our substitute. Our hope is not in our righteousness, but the righteousness and atonement of Jesus Christ alone. There is indeed no hope without it.

American Moralism

While many evangelical Christians seek to make the founding fathers of America Christian, a simple reading of what they said and what they did will show that some of the more famous ones were Deist and in fact disagreed with many foundation truths of Christianity. In fact, the only reason that some of these men held to "religion" was that they thought it was needed to help the people of the country live moral lives, which was necessary for the American experiment to succeed. Stephen Nichols brings this out in Chapter 2 of his book, Jesus Made in America. Read some of the quotes and actions of two of our leading founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Benjamin Franklin, as a young adult, wrote the following words in a letter to his parents who were worried about some of his theological views. He wrote concerning the doctrines a person holds to by saying that if these doctrines do not

tend to make him less Virtuous, he holds none that is dangerous. . . . My Mother grieves that one of her Sons is an Arian, another an Arminian. What an Arminian or an Arian is, I cannot say that I very well know; the Truth is, I make such Distinctions very little to my Study; I think vital Religion has always suffered when Orthodoxy is more regarded than Virtue.

Later on in his life, five weeks before his death, Franklin wrote the following to Ezra Stiles, President of Yale and grandson of Jonathan Edwards, who wanted to know that truth of Franklin's faith. Franklin wrote:

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of who you particularly desire, I think the system of morals, and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England some doubts to his divinity.

So in these two quotations, we seen Franklin admit that he thinks virtue is more important than the orthodox truth of the gospel and we see him deny the divinity of Christ. Franklin has denied the very hope of the Christian religion. If he really believed this, according to Scripture, we must ask if Franklin was truly a Christian.

On the other hand, the liberals of the 20th century have nothing on Thomas Jefferson. During his time as president and again later in life, Jefferson cut and pasted his own version of the New Testament. Since he denied that God acts in the world today, he removed all miracles from the Jefferson Version. His New Testament ended as such:

There they laid Jesus. And rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulcher, and departed. Finis

Jefferson ends his "gospel" with Jesus forever in the grave. It is really no gospel at all and offers no hope than any other religion. The apostle Paul even tells us that if Christ is not raised, we are fools and of all men, the most to be pitied. But Jefferson denies the resurrection and in essence the Christian faith. Jefferson also writes:

To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other.

Nichols writes, "Jefferson's self-claim to being a Christian, which often gets quoted by evangelicals, comes in the very sentence he denies the deity of Christ. In fact, Jefferson goes so far as to claim that being a Christian demands that one see Jesus as Jesus sees himself, which, according to Jefferson, was as human, never claiming divinity." Again, we see a founding father denying the very claims of Christ Himself as divine and still claiming to be Christian.

Why would Jefferson hold to Christianity while denying the foundational truths that makes it what it is? Again Nichols gives us the answer. "What he (Jefferson) liked best about Unitarianism, however, was not its doctrine, but that it presented a simple and clear morality. What mattered most to Jefferson, especially for the new republic, was that Jesus was a virtuous man." Like Franklin, Jefferson clinged to Christianity for its morals.

I write not to criticize these two men. I believed that if they believed what they wrote, they were not Christians from a Biblical standpoint. But the main purpose of this writing it to warn you that the thoughts of these two men are still rampant today. It is moralism. The belief that man can be saved and made right with God by his morality or good works. A belief that Scripture denies (Isaiah 64:6), but one that will continue until the end of time. We are conceived in sin and our works can never justify us before God. But God sent Jesus Christ. Unlike Franklin and Jefferson, the Jesus of the Bible is the God-Man who never sinned, yet died a sinner's death as a substitute for all those who would put their trust in Him. Our ONLY HOPE is to trust in His work. If we do, God credits the wrath our sins deserve on Christ, and the perfect righteousness of Christ to us. We therefore stand forgiven and are declared to be righteousness in Christ. Do not be deceived, your morality will not save you, only Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the only way to God (John 14:6), can save you.